The Hundred-Year House (13 page)

And there was Chad Crosley walking in to ask about his C-minus paper, beet red, hands around his eyes like blinders. He’d been warned.

35

L
eland’s apartment in Evanston smelled pleasantly of cigar smoke. The walls were lined with bookshelves, and an inordinate number of small, dim lamps lit the living room. The three of them sat on the floor, around the neat stack of files and the lockbox. It had been two days since the fund-raiser, but this was the first time they’d been able to meet. Doug had said he was going to the Northwestern library, and Miriam had invented a yoga class.

“Did you read the files?” Doug asked.

“I did better.” Leland flicked the lockbox open, and Miriam applauded. “Well, my locksmith buddy did better.”

“What’s in it?” Doug lifted out the stack of papers and envelopes.

“Nothing good, sorry to say. It’s just Gracie’s stuff. We can’t be this lucky with locks and get lucky with the content too. But you have your Parfitt file, right?”

“You really didn’t look? That’s amazing restraint.” Doug ceremoniously opened the file to reveal the photograph: wet bodies, laughter, penises.

“Jesus God,” Leland said. “Is that Parfitt?”

“Not even.”

Miriam had gone bug-eyed, and some old rule flitted through Doug’s mind, something about not being vulgar in front of southern women. But what she finally said was, “You know what’s
weird? They don’t even have hard-ons. I mean, it’s not
sexy
, you know?”

Leland turned it over. “Crap. Did you see this?” He pointed to the spidery handwriting on the back, the single slanted word and question mark:
Father?
“Someone thinks that’s their father? It can’t be Parfitt’s father, right? The photo quality looks like twenties or thirties, at least.”

As Leland and Miriam passed the photo, Doug flipped through the lockbox papers. The 1954 deed to a car. A 1955 marriage license for George Robert Grant and Grace Saville Devohr. A copy of Gracie’s birth certificate.

“Hey, guys,” he said. “How old did you think Gracie was?”

“Sixty,” said Leland. “Maybe fifty-eight.”

“Sixty-two,” Miriam said. “Bruce is sixty-four, and she’s two years younger.”

“Look.” He put the certificate on the floor. “1925. She’s seventy-four.”

They both squinted at it, with as much voyeuristic glee as they’d ogled the photo.

“So she had Zee when she was forty,” Doug said. “But does Bruce really think she’s younger than him?”

“Maybe that’s why she didn’t want you in the attic,” Leland said.

Miriam said, “That’s why she’s afraid of getting put on the Internet! She doesn’t want anyone doing the math.”

They spent the next hour poring over the 1933 files, and the one major validation for Doug was the fact that at the end of the file lay a document with the heading “Confirmed Guests, Winter 1934,” in which “E. Parfitt” was listed, alongside the note “(4th visit).” Although there was nothing he could immediately use, there was the promise of more. And the fact that the records were so detailed boded well for lists of who was there with Parfitt on his other stays, even minus anything meaningful in his own file.
The other artists might even have mentioned him in their own diaries and correspondence. It would be enough for a clever writer to build some analysis around, some stuff about influence—provided he could get back up to the rest of the files. They’d left the attic door unlocked, but they were sure Sofia, ever thorough, would have discovered it by now and said something to Gracie.

They ordered pizza and Leland dialed up his Internet. Their intent was to find Gracie, to see what was already out there about her. Leland had some vague idea that Doug could use her real birth date to his advantage, either by threatening to expose her or promising to protect her, though Doug doubted he had the guts to pull off either. They found a photo of Gracie as a toddler, blonde curls and a white dress; and another of her at eleven or twelve with her three younger brothers, all a bit petulant next to their dour grandfather, Augustus. It was, indeed, dated 1936. (“My God,” Miriam said, “see, he’s terrifying! Don’t you think he murdered Violet?” “No, but I can see why she wanted out,” Doug said. And Miriam said, “I’m glad it’s her ghost and not
his
.”) And then, following Leland’s hunch, they looked up Gracie’s father, Gamaliel, and studied his face.

“That
could
be him,” Leland said. He was holding the photo of the two naked men next to the computer, comparing the stern businessman on the screen with the naked man on the right, the one throwing his head back in laughter. “It’s a funny angle.”

Miriam said, “And we don’t have Gargamel’s penis online, for comparison.”

“I can’t imagine the chain of events, though,” Doug said. “Gracie finds this picture, recognizes her father, writes on the back, and then of all things she puts it in Edwin Parfitt’s empty file folder?”

“
Or
,” Miriam said, “she emptied the folder because she knew you’d get up there. And she put this there instead.”

“Does she hate me that much?”

“Why else would this be the only file that’s different? Like, where’s his confirmation letter? Where’s his application?”

They stared a bit longer at the online photo of Gamaliel. He was older, but the chin was right, the ears were feasible. Doug remembered that game from the senior yearbook, match the baby with the eighteen-year-old, and how it had been impossible, except for the one Asian kid. Impossible to identify the people who had been your whole world for four years.

It was getting late, but there was more to discuss: How to return the lockbox to the attic, for instance, before Gracie discovered it was gone. How to get the rest of the files.

Leland said, “Look, you don’t need to sneak around anymore. You don’t need to pretend you did nothing wrong. You can play your hand.”

“I didn’t know I had a hand.”

“You have—you have some
tools
at least. You know Gracie’s real age. You know her father might or might not have gone skinny dipping with a male companion.”

Miriam said, “We know she either hates Doug or doesn’t want him writing about Laurelfield.”

“That’s not really a tool,” Leland said.

“
You’re
a tool.”

He pelted her with a pizza crust.

Doug added, “And we know her biggest fears. That civilization ends on the thirty-first, or that it doesn’t and the Internet survives.”

Miriam nodded slowly. “That’s all you need, isn’t it? That’s all it takes to run the world. Knowing people’s fears.”

36

(The air between

our bodies

The miles between

intention

and act

The windows, eclipses, forgettings, doorways,

misses and losses and half-slept dreams

The shrinking space between now

And century’s end

Here

Under stone

Overboard

I’ll tell

the secret I have seen:

The ghosts live in

the space between)

37

O
n December 31 Zee and Doug walked to the big house, arms full of belated gifts. They’d spent Christmas itself at Doug’s mother’s house in Pennsylvania, and there, amid the hoarded statuettes and smoke-stained walls, Zee had felt almost normal again. They ate casserole for four days straight, and helped put in storm windows. It didn’t feel like a return to stability or even a vacation, though, so much as a stay of execution. They had to come back to Laurelfield to face their lives and their marriage and the end of the millennium. Any number of explosive things.

Gracie had decreed that the millennium would go out with a late Noel, and that all presents must be wrapped in silver and blue to make Miriam more comfortable. (“I don’t get it,” Doug had said, and Zee had said, “Just because she’s Jewish. My mother’s an idiot.” “Miriam’s Jewish?” And when she’d stared at him in disbelief, he’d added, “I guess I just thought of her as Texan.” “What, they don’t have Jews in Texas?” “No, like ‘Don’t Mess with Texas.’ Like that sort of overrides everything. I don’t know.” And she’d looked at him hard, trying to figure out if he was really this clueless, or if he thought he needed to pretend, this late in the game, that he hardly knew Miriam. She wanted to tell him he needn’t bother.)

They gathered in the living room around the tree, Case and Miriam underdressed in jeans. Case still wore his boot, but at
least his face had resumed its normal shape. The golden tan he’d shown up with that summer was long gone, replaced by a sickly gray. Sofia was off, the food she prepared yesterday already reheating in the oven.

There were flashlights and oil lamps lined up on the sideboard, waiting for midnight, and boxes in the kitchen full of food and aspirin and matches and batteries and vitamin C and toilet paper, alongside office-sized bottles of water and a kerosene stove. Bruce kept checking his watch. It was only six thirty, but every hour he turned on the TV to check the march of time and potential disaster. City after city survived. Electricity had stayed on in Beijing and New Delhi and Moscow and Paris. Bruce was convinced now that the real trouble wouldn’t start until midnight hit the U.S. east coast, and so that’s what they were waiting for: eleven o’clock central, when the Times Square ball would fall and so, presumably, would humanity.

Miriam scooted around the floor like a lithe elf to distribute the packages. For Bruce, a book on subsistence farming. For Gracie, an antique toast rack. When Miriam opened her present from Doug, Zee nearly gagged: a Ziploc bag of sea glass, blue and green and copper. It would have taken him weeks on the frigid beach to collect so much. Miriam said, “I know how I can work them in!” She meant the monstrous thing on the board in the kitchen, the vertiginous patterns she was laying down inch by inch in wet mortar, better than her other work only in that the pieces were tile and glass instead of garbage. Case gave everyone chocolate. Miriam began opening Zee’s gift, which was truly awful. Three days ago, Zee had gone back to her office and grabbed the pistol cylinder. It was an antique, of sorts. It was interesting. It was also a nongift. It was, quite literally, an empty threat of violence.

But Miriam didn’t seem alarmed. “This is amazing!” she said.

“I thought you could stick pencils in it.”

“It has to be ancient. I
love
it.”

Zee was chagrined that no one had to ask what it was. Even her mother, after a moment of silence, said, “Zilla, where on earth did you find such a thing?”

And Zee said, “Boston.”

There were survival kits from Bruce, sweaters from Gracie, a collection of Marianne Moore poems from Miriam to Doug, with a bizarre inscription:
for walks under those titanic pines
. Doug turned pink. He smiled at his shoes.

And then—as if Zee had done it herself, as if her rage had flown across the room—the window behind the tree shattered into a million raining shards. They kept falling, with a sound like a xylophone, until nothing was left, just a rectangle of night and frigid wind. Gracie stopped shrieking and they all took shelter on the far side of the room. Miriam’s arm was cut, and Doug’s eyebrow, but not badly. Bruce checked his watch (only seven fifteen, not nearly time for the apocalypse), grabbed a poker, and headed out to make sure it wasn’t a thrown rock—but they knew it wasn’t, the way the glass had just disintegrated so gracefully, from everywhere at once. Gracie scampered to silence the burglar alarm.

—

They all moved gingerly for the rest of the night, in case another window shattered. After dinner, Zee cleared the table and snuck back to the living room. Bruce had duct taped a blanket over the window, but the frozen air still crept through. She poured straight vodka into her teacup, and let the tea bag diffuse and turn the liquid golden. She didn’t care how it tasted. Bruce retreated to his study to watch the New Year hit whatever Atlantic islands were three hours ahead. Gracie stood in the kitchen, sorting absently through yesterday’s mail, throwing away a late Christmas card from distant family in Toronto. “I don’t know why they persist in sending these,” she said. Back in the dining room, Miriam hovered over Doug’s chair, inspecting his eyebrow. Her small breasts were inches from his mouth. “I’m worried there’s a sliver still,” she said.

Zee pretended to read Bruce’s
Tribune
and then circled back to the dark living room again, her teacup empty. She’d already started to pour when she noticed Case standing silent with his crutches by the blown-out window. If she hadn’t been numbed from the alcohol, she’d have screamed.

“Would you like a drink?” she said.

Case’s face was ravaged, sunken, nothing but eye sockets and cheekbones. It was hard to remember the way he used to smirk at everything.

She tried again. “Case, I’m sorry about all of it. You’ve had terrible luck. No one deserves that.”

“You know what’s funny?”

She shook her head.

“As soon as someone says
luck
, you know we’re not really talking about luck anymore. If it were luck, the coin would come up heads half the time. Right? It would balance.”

“But it never does.”

“I just think
luck
’s the wrong word. When we bother talking about it, we mean there’s been a whole string of good things or a string of bad things. Like the coin keeps coming up tails.”

“So maybe what we mean is fate.”

“You know about her, don’t you? You know about her.”

“Oh. Oh, Case.” It was terrible: She honestly hadn’t given him much thought in all this. He had it worse than her, home all day to see it, no job. “I
do
know. Case, I’m sorry. I—everyone’s going to get through this.” She brought him a glass of vodka, which he took and held like he didn’t know what it was for.